UU Pretty Good Book Club

Our book group meets the third Tuesday of each month, unless otherwise noted, at 7pm in the Heritage Room at UUCD. All are welcome. Please join us in our reading adventures this year!!

March 2017

Hillbilly Elegy: a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance is about the Appalachian values of the author’s upbringing and their relation to the social problems of his hometown. The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list in August 2016 and January 2017.

April 2017

Evelina by Fanny Burney. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was an English satirical novelist, diarist, and playwright. Her works are read and enjoyed in their own right, but she also foreshadowed the satirical novels of manners written by Jane Austen and others. Evelina, published in 1778, was her first novel.

May 2017

Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes. This novel, by the author of Easter Island, takes place in 2007 as the Olson family gathers for Thanksgiving. Vanderbes is a popular storyteller who creates fascinating characters.

June 2017

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. In 1327, Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor.

July 2017

Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm-From Scratch by Lucie B. Amundson. This is the 2017 Community Read—a great story about one family of egg-trapreneurs in our area!

August 2017

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky. The title makes it clear: Three generations (grandmother, mother, and son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany.

September 2017

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of.

October 2017

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami. This highly awarded book (including the American Book Award) is the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico.

November 2017

The Little Paris Bookshop: A Novel by Nina George. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, Monsieur Perdu prescribes novels for the hardships of life, mending broken hearts and souls. But there’s a problem: the only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself.

December 2017

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal. This novel by the Swedish-Finnish author was translated into English by Thomas Teal and won the Best Translated Book Award in 2011.

January 2017

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. From The New York Times, August 5, 2016. “Colson Whitehead’s novels are rebellious creatures: Each one of them goes to great lengths to break free of the last one, of its structure and language, of its areas of interest. At the same time, they all have one thing in common — the will to work within a recognizable tract of popular culture, taking advantage of conventions while subverting them for the novel’s own purposes.”